 to it. This is the Neo Books Call on Monday, February 12th, 2024. Stuart just talking about the virtues of zoominess, I think, and being as close to telepathy as we can get to. Triggered by me saying I was just reading his comment to the OGM list, replying to Ken, but here he is in the flesh, kind of, and we're sort of there. And feel free to keep going on that for a bit if you want, Stuart. Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, studying spiritual phenomenon and other psychic phenomenon, you know, some of the aspiration of higher consciousness is telepathic communication. And, you know, when we first started to have this kind of technology, my immediate thought was, oh, great, we've got telepathic communication. Here it is in some sense. And I will copy right now a link of a video of Cleo Abram, who is a really good and fun tech commentator analyst on YouTube. And she did a video about the Apple Vision Pro, in which she says the thing she looks forward to most about the Apple Vision Pro is that is as close to teleportation as we seem to be able to get. And I'm a wee bit skeptical about her claim, but I found it interesting nonetheless. Yeah, I also, that just brings up for me, I also saw somewhere recently the price tag of it. Yeah. It was not an inexpensive purchase. Oh, not at all, not at all. It was a kind way of saying that, you know, it's a pricey purchase. Well, it's $3,500 list and you'll spend $4,500 by the time you buy the case and some lenses and an extra battery and a couple of things like that. Stacey, thank you for connecting with us while you drive. You're actually even pulled over. Super. So you're not going to, like, drive off the road if we distract you too much. That's really good. We left last call, and Pete is not on right now, he may join. We left last call in that we were going to have a conversation about a taxonomy of different kinds of collective authorship. I will post the link in the chat. And Pete and I didn't have a chance to go do more on it in between, so I'm thinking we should probably just postpone that. But I also wanted to do a little bit of after action review because it feels like my choosing that topic didn't work so well on our call last week. And for that reason, so to Pete, now we're going to go off and see if we could, like, munch and crunch and improve the topic some and come back with something that was more useful to the conversation. But I was under the impression, at least, that that was not a great topic to pick for us to go into and we didn't enjoy or make much progress going into it. I like the call, but I like all our calls. And any thoughts you have, if you remember what that call was, please jump in now. Maybe you could stop by seeing what you felt was useful about it, Jerry, just to jog our memories. I'm sure. And then to Stuart as well. So for me, I have been studying groupware slash computer supported collaborative work slash social media slash whatever the hell you want to call it, since my first moments as a tech industry analyst back in 88. I've always cared about how computers mediate human communication and been through and read and even suggested a couple of frameworks for how all that stuff works and care a lot about a lot of subtleties, maybe how we help each other, how we amplify and improve others comments, how we suppress or dissent to the comments we disagree with, all that stuff is really, really, really fascinating to me. And I think important to civilization because talking online allows us to talk a lot more often and a lot more broadly for zero marginal cost than face to face the face to face stuff that we used to be limited by. And certainly then even then the publishing industries and other kinds of recording and media industries, because until the internet, those were all very limited to get a book published you had to find a publisher who would not and say yes and then you had to write a book and then so very few people had kind of written books. And all of a sudden it seems like lots and lots and lots of people have written books, etc. So that's a piece of it. So for me we turned over that soil a bunch. And where we got bogged down was in kind of our agreements or disagreements about what that means and how it might be applied. And we went back to well, this needs to be made really pragmatic. It's not pragmatic yet this is such an abstract conversation. I was like, no, no, no, it's really pragmatic because Pete and I are talking about which of these affordances to add to the Neo books project and to his massive wiki right now. And if we do that early well, then it plays out well, but that didn't that didn't sell in this in this group. I don't I don't think so that's kind of where I was. But that's a piece of that of the conversation that that that is memorable to me right now. Stuart, if you wanted to jump in. Well, I was just I was just going to say not being a person of of of technology. I'm wondering where this conversation is going. And when we're going to do some production of Neo books, we could talk about what they are and what the taxonomy is and what the details of it from now until doomsday. But I'm I'm just I'm getting a little antsy. That's my you know, and I just wanted to get that out there. I've mentioned it to Jose and and and here we are. I mean, I thought a few months ago, we were getting close, you know, with classes project. And then all of a sudden, we've other people have joined. And and and here we are, you know, kind of ruminating about the things we've been we've been talking about. So that's my that I just wanted to put that out there at the beginning of the call. And I think what you just said, Stuart, is a perfect example of my impression of how last week's call didn't actually go over well. And and my intention is not to drive us back into the topic. Now I just wanted to debrief on it briefly. I don't I don't think we need to go there. And I still have the impression that doing that makes the Neo books project actually work better. But isn't about publishing a Kindle or E pub Neo book because it's beyond that it's like, Oh, what's it going to be like if if we're telling people that coming in here and interacting with the nuggets is the important part of Neo books that's different from a regular book, then the abstract thinking that we talked about last week needs to be fixed. But I'm happy to do that offline separately with Pete. And I agree with you I'm impatient also for us to get books out. The closest we've come to that is Pete and me going through classes manuscript and trying to figure out how to automatically or manually chunk it up into nuggets and break it up into markdown pieces. Ironically, our desire to do that and disaggregate it so that it feels like a new book and so that the chunks are actually interact interactable and reusable will be a way point on the way back to maybe a Google doc and maybe a word doc because that seems to be the path over to pandox, which is the software that helps you spit out E pubs, right. And so there's this irony that thinking about Neo books and trying to make a new book is going to sort of add work to the process and neither Pete nor I have the time resources to be an actual line editor and composer, and other kinds of things. That's why we're trying to figure out how to automate it. And it turns out that the automated export includes a whole bunch of funny codes and stuff like that that lingers in from Google docs that we want to know what we're doing about eliminating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm trying to figure out how do we short circuit that so that we can spit out an ebook ASAP. And by the way, I'm not saying that it's not that these conversations aren't important, you know, to know where we're going before we actually move into a production space. But, you know, you can't know everything. And at some point in time, you got to just begin a total totally agree class class then Rick. Yeah, I'm also in this. Let's just begin to something so some not against the wall camp of things. Right. So what I what I would envision is something similar to this website here, to put a user interface up there, make it really interesting and sexy to to for people to get onto it. You can charge a membership fee for something like this. And then you can list all these ebooks that we have so far, even in developmental stage, and give them an entry point. So I don't think there's a great need, Jerry, for you and Pete to rewrite these books or you know, do a lot with the text. Because when you create sub chapters, you have a website for a user interface that allows you to enter. Then you see here, here are the titles and you get into one of the titles. And then that title may be split up in nuggets. I just think something as simple as this just move now and then as as something as we learn more and we get feedback from people using this, we can improve it. But I just I just think there has to be a starting point somewhere. Class you have you have made probably unintentionally just opened up a different can of worms, which is connecting these Neo books to chat GPT and creating GPTs around them, which I agree is an important and interesting thing, but is a step beyond the simple creation of what smells and looks like a book. You may be saying, let's just skip that and let's just create some GPTs connected to the material we think belongs in a book. And I'm trying to go through the process of having a book that shows up with an ISBN number and is available for purchase on Amazon, which may be a time sink digression after all. So there's there's a conversation that we've touched a little bit here, which is, Hey, does chat GPT sort of obsolete, no taking and bookmaking? And do we just talk to the GPTs, which I think is what you're saying? No, that's not what I'm saying. Okay, I just I'm just suggesting to put a user interface up there where you can get into a book. And maybe there maybe some of the books have a chat GPT interface, in addition to the book itself, right? You can ask me questions here or whatever. But but in general, I just think just have a basic website, you know, with places to enter and allowing access to individual books with or without chat GPT. Okay, sorry, but pie.ai is one of those GPT, one of those LLMs. And I thought, because you gave us a pie link that you meant front ending them entirely with GPTs. Yeah, no, I'm sorry. I mean, I just crapped a website that looked like something I can visualize for this purpose. Okay, thank you. Simple UI. Something very simple that just like leads you into the material. Okay, Rick, then Jose. Yeah, I just had to go at top of the hour just to let you know. Yeah, no, I enjoyed last week. But on the other hand, I share Stuart's feelings about let's let's do something. And I just want to bring notice to something Klaus put in LinkedIn where he asked it a question, gave a response and my response, maybe you responded to my question. And what it was was, you know, what needs to be improved and what's missing in the response to AI. And I think coming in with little sort of, you know, sort of micro projects, so to speak, that are set up, that is part of the doing and learning of this and particularly using AI. You know, as I mentioned before, I'm interested in expanding the metaphor beyond nuggets. But really, the outcome that I'm much more interested is, how can you design these new books to create ongoing intergenerational learning communities? And that's what I'm more interested in. And so I've written a blog post, which is an attempt to sort of move in that direction. And at some point down the road, if people are interested, and I think the supplies to anyone, but some of you are writing up for critique prior to a meeting, and let's do a deep dive into something, and let people, you know, rip on it, you know, and see what comes out of it. So, you know, this would just, you know, close the circle between theory and practice. So that's my two cents. Thanks, Rick. And just to remind us, can you post a link to that post in the chat? Yeah, I can do that. Yeah. Yeah. I'll do that. Thanks. There it is. Yep. Cool. Jose, you had your hand up a moment ago. Did you mean to still have it up? I didn't realize I didn't have it up still. So I sent the email or message or something to Pete and yourself about what I was hearing as far as how we wanted to structure things. And I went kind of meta and tried to understand where you guys were going, which was a lot more low level than what I was thinking, which I guess we would need to do at some point. But I was trying to wrap my head around it at a higher level. And one of the things that I wondered was what you were calling, sorry, I call them building blocks, you call them something else. Nuggets. Nuggets. What you were calling nuggets seemed to me to not just be textual blocks, but conceptual blocks. Right. And that conceptual blocks when we interact with conceptual blocks that what we would want to do is build a conceptual frame by which those conceptual blocks would then be, you know, we could interact with. And so if we say, okay, well, I'm going to, and I think I used in that email, the concept that, you know, Klaus is basing his work on some conceptual principles. Right. And he's saying, oh, you know, food is a biological thing. There is biological needs for people. And the food is a biological process. And we can understand these two things. And what we need to do is regulate these two things into coming together in the form of good available food without destroying the soil and make them available to human needs. Very simple conceptual frame for what Klaus is working on. It may not actually be accurate, but that's what I was depicting. And that the work we're doing is similar. It has the similar foundational blocks of, you know, we're talking about biological processes. These biological processes, if understood and accepted, don't allow for a lot of the crap that comes out of of other ways of framing things. So we could actually share some of the same foundational blocks, conceptual foundational blocks. And then the words that we use to describe those things or frame those things and beyond that would be unique. But they would be tied to these things that we could then argue and have different views on and have different ways of depicting them and so on and so forth. It seems to me it creates a way for us to fragment these books that isn't just a bunch of words. Otherwise, in my mind, and maybe I'm missing something, but in my mind, if we take a book, say, you know, 20,000 words, small book, and we fragmented up into chunks arbitrarily, somewhat arbitrarily, then now we've got, you know, what, a thousand, two thousand, three thousand chunks that no one can really hold any structure around unless those chunks are kind of grounded in some way. And I know that I'm being quite structural here in my definition and what I'm envisioning. And you said, I think in your reply, that if it was that kind of rigid, a structure that you wouldn't be interested in, I don't understand how we chunk things without having some structure to those chunks. If the chunks are just, you know, anything that's roughly 100 words, that's a chunk and makes a sentence and, you know, whatever. That's not a chunk, definitely. Okay. So I need to understand that for me to be able to play in the space that you guys are playing it. And I'm listening hard to you because I'm not sure we're that far apart in how we're thinking about this, but we're probably a little apart in how we're thinking about implementing this or how we think it should look. And so let me explore this a little bit with you here. I'm not sure how you pick and choose what a foundational block is and the way I'm hearing you. It's like, if I want a foundational block, well, the Wikipedia has a page about carbon or carbon sequestration that you might think of as a foundational block or nugget, because it's an explanation vetted by a community of experts, sort of in the Wikipedia style, that's very referensible. It's a nice way to centralize or crystallize the argument about it, but it makes it hard to have an opinion or tell a story around, it doesn't make it hard, but you can't on the page for carbon, express a narrative around carbon that is an opinion you hold around carbon sequestration, what's good or what's bad. So that opinion to me is a nugget that would then probably decompose into smaller nuggets, because your opinion, Klaus's opinion that regenerative agriculture and other forms of improving the food system represent the best payoff for humans trying to address climate change in present is an argument. That argument breaks down into 500 or 15, or I don't know how many different nuggets or blocks that he's building on, right? Because here are all the payoffs for regenerative agriculture. Here it just goes, it's turtles all the way down, kind of, and each turtle is in some sense a nugget that might even contain other nuggets or blocks. And of those, I think for each of us, some of those would be more important than others. And maybe the word is foundational. And I like that a lot. But I don't know that we would agree on which nuggets are foundational. And I'm really interested personally in the process of which of these bubble up to become most attractive, most important, most supported by a lot of people, because I think those might become your foundational blocks. But I don't think you can start by declaring them. I think they emerge from the interactions of the community over time and maybe never get labeled foundational or maybe each of us individually says, oh, and of all the blocks or nuggets that I care about, these are my foundational ones. And then we see how that plays out in the aggregate. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I'm not suggesting that we agree. Here's our 50 of, you know, foundational blocks. That's what I was hearing you say. No, no, no. What I'm saying is, here's my second stir. Thanks. Let me assert mine, right? This is what I've got. This is what I'm starting. Oh, by the way, I really like what Klaus is starting with that thing. I'm going to tie one of mine to Klaus's thing, right? Because that makes sense, right? And oh, Stewart's got two or three that are good. What the hell? I've never seen that one. I love laser light show. It's good. I've never seen it. I can also do confetti. Yeah, yeah. There you go. All right. All right. Yeah, I do the confetti. You have to have the latest Mac OS running and Stewart does. This is a laser light show. Love it. Love it. Love it. Klaus, just do the peace symbol for a second. Are you on Macintosh class? There you go. There you go. Good. So you have all the gestures as well. Rick, don't move it around. Leave it next to your head. There you go. Everybody on the call. Stacey, you're on your phone, so we don't know, but and I think you're on Windows. It only works on Mac OS on desktops. Otherwise, it looks like you're having it. You're doing a peace symbol. Yeah, I'm on my phone getting back in the car. Exactly. But thanks for trying. What was the other one? There was one that I missed. This is a laser light show. Two thumbs up is fireworks. Two thumbs down is rainstorm. One thumb up is a thumbs up amplified. Come on. There we go. One thumb down is a thumbs down amplified. And then single one of these is balloons. Two of these is confetti. Can I just say something before I go off? This was adorable, but I really wanted to hear the last part of what Jose was saying, and I'm wondering if he lost his train of thought. We're going back to it now, and I apologize for the digression. How do you do confetti? Two. Two piece thumbs. Thank you. They're also all in the menu. If you look at your menu bar, there should be a little video camera in a green rectangle. If you click on that, you can individually trigger them just by going through the menus there. Back to you in the booth for what you were saying before, Jose. Yes. So they're emergent. They're not predefined. They become communal. In other words, I like what you're going. Let's talk about this. Let's share this. Let's create our foundational block. Can we agree on this? That'd be a cool foundational block for us to agree on, because I think that gets us down the road as a community. Hey, I've just written this text related to that foundational block, and can you vet this text, see if it resonates to you, and how you're using that foundational block, and we can maybe build a bridge between what we're talking about. I'm talking about classes talking about food, and I'm talking about something else. That's okay. Is it still grounded in that foundational block? To me, that's the beauty of this. It sounds like this is what we're talking about the same thing, and in no way I'm suggesting that we prescribe what those foundational blocks can or should be from day one. Go ahead, Stuart. I just wanted to jump the cue because I think it's important. Sorry, guys. Jose, I heard you intimate that the way things would be broken up into chunks was just something structural, and Jerry, I assume that the way things would be broken up into chunks will have some intelligence to it, some AI component in some ways. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify that and make sure we all understood that. And we've talked a bit on these calls about nuggetization, the process of creating these nuggets that are kind of holons of information that might include other holons, etc. And I think, Jose, the question you're bringing up, the more I think about how we were agreeing, this is about the nomenclature for the process. What do we call it when you and I agree on something, and we both think that thing is important? Is it a foundational block? Is it something else? What do we call that process of agreement? How do we make it visible to other people? I think those things we all have to figure out and bubble out of this process. And those are crucially important for the hope that I have for what neobooks are that's different from a regular book. Is that good for you? Yeah, yeah. I know if it sounds like we're on the same page, how we get there is a slightly different story. But I think for me, I couldn't go forward without understanding that we were on that page because if we're just talking about text, then we're screwed. Bingo. And thank you for asking these really interesting kind of complicated questions and for sitting through the discussions that clarify them because they're really clarifying to the whole project. So really appreciate that. Klaus, then Rick. Yeah, I mean, on my structural mindset here, to me foundational, for example, would be nature-based systems, social systems, energy systems. And under nature-based systems, you can bring in Dave with his, what is he working on, landscape ideas, you can bring in garden world. So you have a plot of nature-based solutions. Social systems design could be another plot. Then when it comes to nuggets, there's a certain logic that just evolves. Like, when we wrote the first book, we gave it to several people. Bill was one of them. And he declared, this is not one book, these are three books. Because in his mind, they were totally, three totally different topics. And then I had to clarify how they are connected. And so you have a sort of an intuitive structure for what are the nuggets in this story, because it sort of falls apart when you look at this from a topical perspective. But I would lay out a structure first. So you have some kind of categorization where things fall into. Now, then there are discussions in garden world, in duck's garden world, in my book that would fall under social. I mean, you can take a nugget out of my book and put it into, take spiral dynamics and put it wherever. And so that's sort of how I was looking at these, at this kind of format. But you have to have some kind of orientation for someone, let's say, we create a URL. You open up, you look at this. How do you orient yourself? How do you know what you might be interested at looking to look at? So you have a guidance system that leads you towards, oh, I want to look at what's happening in energy, who's writing what in that field. And so that's sort of where I was coming from. Go ahead and say that. I'll jump in. I was just going to say that I think, for me, what Klaus just said, speaks to two ways then of getting at these Neo books. I can get into a Neo book through these foundational blocks, where I could say, oh, that's an interesting one. Somebody said that this is a thing that's foundational, and it leads to these three books. Very interesting. Three people are working on these things with this foundational view. And then I can go and look at, oh, we're talking about food. That's cool. And I can get down to the foundational view. So however I come in to touch up on these things or interact with them, and to me, I'm less worried about the interaction up the stream than I am at downstream. I'd rather people engage downstream because that fundamentally changes so many more opportunities upstream, right? Don't just talk about how I wrote something and so on and so forth, or my necessary, my subject matter, but the foundational blocks that I'm working with, because if we can get the foundational blocks better, then how we then express those things moving forward is more consistent across our community of Neo book authors, right? Yes. And I think what you're talking about in the discussion we're having right now points out the complexity of having reusable nuggets in that we're trying to get to what you're saying, that there are different paths into different ideas, that different people use different nuggets in different ways for different narratives, that when you look at a nugget, you can say, oh, this nugget exists, this actual text right here lives in three different books written by three different authors or two different authors, because the same nugget showed up in two different ways by the same author or something like that. And how do you follow those paths? And how do you make those arguments? So that, and in that particular nugget might be improving over time as somebody offers edits to it and suggestions to it that make it a clearer argument or make the case better or whatever else. And as long as it still fits in the flow or the narrative flow of the books that it connects to, we're golden. If it breaks those narratives, then you might have to stay with the older version of the same nugget. And yet you're still related, you're still kind of connected into the web of ideas. Klaus, when Bill suggested that there may be three books that you have, I was puzzled and I don't think we have this conversation, but I have a feeling that your book as you, your original manuscript as it was, was kind of one book because I saw the narrative you were trying to build, the narrative arc. But I think Bill read it as three books because it wasn't connected, the ligatures, the connective tissue in prose wasn't quite there yet. It wasn't making, you weren't bridging one to the other as much as could have been done. But it felt like one book, and then it felt like you could totally take the latter half of the book, add some more material to it and say, hey, here's a pragmatic use of spiral dynamics with a case study in regenerative agriculture. And that would be its own separate standalone book about how to apply spiral dynamics. And it could reuse a bunch of the chapters or nuggets that you had already written. And then somebody else might take some pieces of what you wrote and do something different with it. Again, the repurposibility or reuse of these nuggets being really important to the whole Neo books concept. But does that make sense? Well, don't forget that you're in Stuart where with me, you know, throughout the writing process and you kept asking me questions, which then made me go back and updated. Bill did not participate in any of these discussions. And he saw this whole thing for the first time and that's how we came up with these are three seemingly unrelated topics. They were not unrelated to us because we had talked through them. And so that was really a very important contribution that Bill made there by asking, by sharing his observation and asking questions about it. And I think that's also this kind of process is very helpful to develop a Neo book, you know, so that you have sort of a real life check review, you explain what you're trying to express and it may not come across and then you go back. So when Bill said that, there's two, at least more than two, but there's two different answers you might have to that. One of them is to break the manuscript up into three different books. The other one is to weave the three pieces together so that they feel more like one book. Which of those directions resonates for you? Well, I mean, obviously, I had one topic, right? And I wanted to get to that topic in the most, in a way that allows you to communicate. So the first thing was, here's the story, right? And then it's like, and here's how you have to communicate the story because obviously the issues with people receiving what you're talking about here. And then thirdly, now that we have had this conversation, how do you go about fixing stuff? And that's when you get into theory you, right? Because here is a social systems management, change management process structure, right? That guides you. So that's the logic connection between those three. So to me, it's one story. Good. And to me as well, Klaus, thank you. Oh, sorry, Stuart. Sorry to make you wait, Stuart. Jump on in. No worries. So I think what we're talking about is some kind of an editorial process. Yes. Before stuff is released. And understanding what our editorial process is. And I, you know, from my own background and experience, you know, some folks go with like one editor, my response is no. You need multiple views to get a much better, to get the best product that you can. And your question opens some really interesting doors in that editorial process. If we were, if this was a, if this was Houghton Mifflin or Norton or something, a well-known book publisher or BK, they would have a content editor, they would have a line editor, they'd have a couple of different kinds of edit passes, and you would step through those in a very well-known structure and timing that would turn into a finished book thing. We're, we don't have the resources to have each of those editors paid to do the proper job they do. We do have a light little crowd of people who might crowd source some editing, which is really interesting. And then we have this hope that the nuggets are interesting enough that people would come in and sort of curate them over time beyond the publication of the first version of the book, which is something that just never happens, right? You're done with the book, the author might go back and do an updated and revised edition a decade later, that happens, but it happens seldom. And here we're saying that the contents of a good book should be alive and lively and improving just over time. And they should be included in other books that emerge afterward. And that just like modern music sampling prior music and riffing on it is a homage to the previous tunes that we would do exactly the same thing, which would be different from just quoting a couple paragraphs or a couple lines from another book, which is common practice in books now. It would be different because we would actually be reusing whole nuggets, which is kind of a scaling up of, hey, I'm just quoting a couple sentences because I like what Sue wrote three decades ago. But here's what I'm envisioning when I'd like to also speak to this editing idea or editorial process. But here's what I'm envisioning as how a nugget might show up in a document, right? So here's a paragraph as I'm scrolling down the page and that when I'm on a paragraph, that paragraph highlights in comparison to the paragraph above or below or maybe a sentence or whatever the case may be. And that there's a nugget block or a block that shows up that says, hey, this has got a foundational thing on it. And poof pop up, here's the foundational thing. You can click on that foundational thing, you can go read it, you can interact with it, you can have fun with it. But each piece links back to foundational statements, building blocks that are back there that I want to be bound to in this specific paragraph or specific sentence or whatever it is. And that the editorial process actually for me starts with a community conversation around what are good blocks to start with. For me, not that you're telling me what they are. But if I say, listen, I want to start with this, oh, we already have a block for that. Here's where it is. And here's how it's framed. No, not good for me. I want to fork it. I want to start another block. It's different. It's not the same as yours. Or it's not the same as one that's already there. Or that's really good. You think the community would be okay if I edited and made version two of it, so that it also includes x, y, z. Then I want, I want to be able to go back to my stuff and say, instead of biological nature, v one, I want to actually attach the biological nature v three, because that's actually more nuanced. It's better. It's got some teeth that something that I haven't had. That automatically changes the quality of my book without having written a single word. Because now I'm connected to something that's foundationally has more teeth or nuance or whatever the case may be. Does that reflect what you guys are thinking? Because to me, the editorial process isn't so much about the writing at the end in the Neo book, but the building block piece at the beginning, the foundational piece at the beginning, because now we're talking about community to organize how we're going to support what we're about to write, rather than simply, here, let me write a whole bunch of stuff and then support it later, or never supported necessarily other than in the writing. Super interesting. And I love how you're, thanks for drawing an illustration of it and showing us that. That's really cool. I think I'm along with you a lot, and I'll generalize it a little bit in the sense of, for me, the whole manuscript of a Neo book is composed of nuggets, some of which are just connective tissue words that like bridge, they're not important. They're just like telling a story, or they might be a little anecdote that can stand on its own. That's a nugget, but it's not important. It's just an illustrative nugget. And then we get to others, but every one of them, if you want to look at this in nugget view, every one of them is highlighted and has metadata and has other kinds of things. A few of those would have a big star, a big affordance of some sort that says this nugget is foundational to Jose. This nugget is a foundational one, not just to Jose, but to this large community of people who have connected up and decided to sort of make this a really central piece because they agree on this. And by the way, this process is to me what democracy should feel like. So I just sent a note out to the list saying, hey, we're going to have these four calls on democracy. What I like about Neo books in there, if this were wildly successful, is that the thing we're talking about right now would be the way people and communities debate issues like immigration reform, policing, drug dependence and cleanup, all those kinds of things. Those are hugely important social things that lots of people write editorials and books about, but those things don't ever really converge. They don't come together every now and then like Thomas Edsal as an older columnist, older white columnist for the New York Times. He writes these really long, very long, very link rich articles about important issues. And I don't usually have time to read them all, but boy, he is going back to the science here. I interviewed these two social scientists who wrote this really good book. Here's the essence of what they did and how it fits into my argument. He's doing this only on an old school, you know, newspaper article kind of basis. But if we can do this properly, and if the communities that come around and collaborate to elaborate these nuggets, do their job well, then we're doing the same as Wikipedia only better and more in a different realm in some sense, because Wikipedia is just an encyclopedia where this is discourse about all of the issues that would build on. It does not ignore Wikipedia, but builds on it because it's like, Hey, if you want to know about watershed regulations, here's the page on that, you know, in Wikipedia, or if you want to know about control grazing or whatever else it is, here's the page on that. But this is the potential of this project is actually in the dynamics you're just describing. But I think that every nugget is sort of equal to the interface to the software. And some of the nuggets are called out as special or foundational because of the person whose opinion I'm looking at right now on that nugget. And the community. Yes. And the community. Bingo. So what I'm hearing is that perhaps unique, perhaps not. The conception of a Neo book is that it will be immuno, not just in the evolution, but also in the birthing. In other words, there will be input in the emergence of what it is the author wants to say. There'll be input in that. And then also in once it's said in the in the in the evolution of it. So probably, but not always. I think some authors, some authors will just write their damn book. And if they decide to make it a Neo book, they might then post it pre publication out. And other people might say, Oh, this stretch of your book is just like this nugget that we've been working on. What do you want to connect it? Do you want to replace it? Whatever else that could happen. But I can think of a lot of writers because of how we've written books might want to be the solitary offer author of a work. And they might be intrigued by the Neo book thing, but not want to create in that mode. Yeah, agree. So what I'm kind of saying is that not every author is going to be happy about being interrupted, like, Oh, the thing you just wrote it is over here. It's like, Yeah, stop, I'm trying to write a book. But I would like that. But if we're going to, I think if what we're going to do is build a community of nuggets, then having a formal process of saying, Hey, you want to start a project? Here's kind of how you could do it. You can meet with people or you could, you know, read this thing and watch this video and, and you could figure out, you know, sort of what are your foundational blocks. And here's how you can sort of do that and how those foundational blocks have led to other writings. So you can see how other people use those blocks, because, you know, there's five people that already use this block. And here's how they framed it that could educate you. I think that's the culture that a new books would want to build, not one of, Oh, you already have a book connected to the community, and kind of do it in an ad hoc way where you're not actually using the communal pools, the communal blocks that are really going to provide us as a world, a new way of seeing ideas and dealing with ideas, rather than as an individual expressing his thoughts as a community, building on knowledge structures. Totally agree. This, this is about how do communities do sense making as much as anything else. I totally agree. Does it look like you want to jump in? No, okay. Oh, that was, that was hugely interesting and useful for me. Just hearing how you're seeing it and what you would, what you would envision and us sort of negotiating what we mean by, by all the dynamics. And this is very, very much about community wisdom, like shared wisdom. How do we, how do we make shared wisdom a little bit more permanent and more improvable? And we're building on each other, not, oh, let me throw away your book and go write my own because, fuck you, you, you know, you're just writing a book and it's all about you. And if I disagree with your opinion, I might park my nugget opposite your nugget in an argumentation map that pros and cons on the same issue. Exactly. And that's how we should actually be talking this thing forward. And, and if somebody says, oh, Stuart's idea on this nugget is actually the one that resonates with us, then it goes down and, and, you know, my idea doesn't, doesn't resonate. I learned the lesson. Maybe I need to move over to Stuart's idea because it makes more sense. And then we could proxy our votes over to Stuart and he could represent us in some kind of larger decision-making process that's more official. And that's how this can affect democracy and elections. Go ahead, Stuart. You clearly are laughing at me. I just, I just went to a place of sensuality, Jerry. When you, oh wow, how did that happen? When you started talking about one person parking their nugget next to another person. I love you, Stuart, but please do not get anywhere near me. Keep our nuggets clear. That's very funny. Good. What else do we want to talk about on this topic? Go ahead. What I was going to say, the other thing that, that emerged to me when I was thinking about building blocks. So my background is in architecture when I was very, very young. And you build a foundation. Well, first you prep the soil, then you build the foundation. First you choose a site. Yeah. And, and then you start building affordances on top of that foundation that meet the needs of the inhabitants or the users of that space, right? So to your point about that there is, there are pieces that sit on top of it that are structural. They're still structural. They may not be foundational, but they're structural. And then there are pieces that are less about the structure and more about the aesthetics and the usability and the, you know, the, the player of the occupant, right? I would really love this thing in, in this room that has nothing to do with the structure, but it has to do with the aesthetics or the, how I wish to use this space. And I think to me that, again, that's just because of how I think, but maybe whether we use that language or not using that kind of conceptual structure helps us to define what elements we have in, in these components. So a nugget is a foundational block or is a structural block or is a functional block or is an aesthetic block or it's a flow through block that gets us in and out of different spaces, gets us in and out of different structural elements and so on and so forth. To me, building that, if that's what you guys meant by taxonomy, then that, that, that I think is a great first starting point. Maybe three things to reply with. Oops, there we go. One, let me, let me extend your metaphor because when you're pouring the foundation for a house or building, you have to leave room for sewage pipes, electrical plumbing, like there's a whole bunch of infrastructure that if you don't put it in at the foundation stage, you are screwed later on and you'll be drilling through, you'll be drilling through stuff that you don't want to drill through to try to add, hey Pete, we're having a very juicy conversation about the, some of the pieces that we were on before. Yeah, thanks, thanks for joining up and I'm just replying to Jose on a couple different things. So when Pete and I were on the digression about the taxonomy of how do we, how do we sort of comment and stuff like that, that was, hey, what size conduit and what kind of pipe do we need to put into the foundational software of the Neobook system so that people understand this? And when I put in the chat something I've said a couple times here, which is the trope of cut copy paste, which we take for granted now because the keyboard has XCV, which is really handy and everybody knows how to cut copy paste text between applications, which didn't use to happen until a few people wrote software that standardized how cut copy paste work across applications, all of that. Part of my hope is that the more complicated aspects of how we collaborate around these nuggets or blocks will involve a similarly simple trope that I don't know yet. I have not invented it or envisioned it, but it should be simpler than it is right now to figure out how do I want to engage with this piece? And how can I help or how can I reuse it or whatever else that might be? And I'm hoping that that becomes kind of a trope. But the reason for some of these more abstract conversations was that we were trying to architect or engineer the foundational bits of the software that we're using so that later, once we've got a book and once people show up to say, okay, great, you attracted me with the book, I'm ready to talk around the nuggets as part of your community, we had something to offer them that worked well. And I think it's only going to work well. If those of us composing nuggets as if they were interactive nuggets early on, actually write with those affordances present. We need those things sooner, not later, not added in when people show up to really talk. We need the talking bits need to be evolved very early in the process and need to be better than and more than fork and pull on GitHub, which is what we've currently got as a default setting. And so really what you're talking about is using continuing with my building metaphor, you're talking about what tools we can use on these blocks. What's the equipment that we have with which to interact with them? And it's very much like my friend Doc Searles is building a house in Bloomington, Indiana, and he asked a question in one of the groups I'm in, hey, do I put cat five in? Do I put fiber in the walls? I want to have a nicely wired house. Do I just do wireless and not worry about conduits at all in the walls? That was an infrastructure question that is appropriate right now because technology has moved ahead and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because 20 years ago you would have laid as much cat five as you possibly could because you were like, oh, I want to have like fancy internet to all my rooms. But that's a different question today, right? So Pete and I were having that question about how do we do conversations around nuggets? So what's popping up for me is some kind of a primer for writers so that at the beginning of the process, if someone wants to create some new conception, they're aware of how this will develop, expand so that a writer can put that into the mix as they're creating text and addressing certain topics. And I started a page that's sort of like that, but I think not as not as focused as what you just said, but yes. And maybe throwing this out, I'm not sure this makes any sense, but continuing with a building metaphor, maybe the thing that is interesting as a starting point is a conceptual soil in which any of these blocks are built on. Which I think is part of the taxonomy that Pete and I were talking about, and which was a little segment of that, not the entire picture, but a piece of that was that. I just want to add a brief personal story about understanding infrastructure and the the building metaphor. My first real job at the age of 15 working for my father who was a plumbing and heating contractor, I spent the entire summer sitting on my ass with a hammer and chisel working my way through four-inch concrete floors because they forgot to put the sleeves in for the piping in the hospital. Oh, awful. Yeah, and we wound up having to partially demolish a half built home up here in the hills of Fremont, California in order to put extra pilings on it because the pilings that were driven down had not been sufficient for what the structure was based on the soil conditions. So it's a number of factors when you start looking at structural needs. And that's I think the interesting question is, how do we look at it holistically first to understand I think the questions that Jerry and Pete are talking about, and then drill down into some of those things, no pun intended, to figure out how do we structure them. I'm getting more excited about this guys because it feels like we're on the same page and I especially love the fact that this would not be a system of me building a book, but a community driven way of building knowledge and conceptual integrity behind things that are being written and that that conceptual integrity resonates with the community. I just pasted a link to a really unfinished page that points to the taxonomy page Pete put up that is meant to be a hey I'd like to write a NIO book how do I go about doing this kind of thing and I think I have a couple others that are related that I need to bring together into the primer that we're talking about here. So I think there's probably one page or pages needed for why on earth would you want to do a NIO book like and I've got what's a NIO book and why are nuggets powerful that that's kind of there's a NIO books introduction page and there's a why nuggets are powerful page which I need to update from from stuff we've just figured out in this conversation, but then there also needs to be a okay I'd like to jump in how do I do this dance with you page as well. So you'd like to write a NIO book question. Cool. Pete we started with me saying that me apologizing for bringing up the cooperative authoring topic last time and debriefing that that I think that you and I were like yeah yeah yeah let's do this and I'm not sure everybody else was was on board. Then we went into some impatience with hey we need to like produce NIO books and then we had a lot of really interesting sort of layering and expanding of what do we mean by the different dynamics that we've been talking about and and coming back into like we mostly I think agree on on how these dynamics ought to work and we're also mostly impatient to go get books. I also stated in the middle of it that we don't have the resources to do proper editing right now you know Pete you and I talked about how do we divide up what we can do to try to edit manuscripts and so forth but we don't have a successful way to crowd source for example good useful edits of the many kinds that are needed for a manuscript to look really top-notch like a published book. So what do we do in the meantime is a realistic question. I just something just entered my mind as you said that Jerry if we have a bunch of foundational nuggets built into a NIO book and those foundational nuggets have examples are tied to pre-existing different writings that reflect the essence of those foundational blocks would AI be able to then say okay so you're using this block because you explicitly say you're using this this block here here here here here here and there I'm going to do an edit of this or derive a bunch of questions around what's not coherent with how that block pre-existing may be that you're adding something new to it and then suggest shouldn't the block so I write a whole bunch of stuff and say this belongs to that block and then it says uh well yeah but maybe this needs to be added to that block why don't you vet the community with the community these questions in order for that block to then really be consistent with what you're saying that might be a really interesting as we're writing a way to get more community involvement from suggestions that the AI actually generates or questions that the AI generates as we're writing I think I think I'm only beginning to think through the many ways that AIs could help us do this whole process and I'm I'm clearly fighting the trope that hey Gen AI basically obsolete note-taking and humans making nuggets and writing books and all that kind of stuff we're not we're not even going to buy books anymore we're going to chat to books which are going to be the excerpts of the contents of the ideas in people's heads and I got to say that earlier when Klaus was like what you know he put a link Pete in the chat to pie.ai slash explore I think which is one interesting simple interface for exploring books and if we bypass books altogether and had an enthusiastic community creating nuggets that interacted and then wired Gen AI to that we would kind of have that we could just ignore the whole book expression thing all together for me I call I called this Neo books and I'm interested in producing what looked like books because I think books are the calling card and the thing that will attract people to the project you're like oh smart people write books but I'm I would rather be in the thick of the discussions and wire AI in so that we can just have people talk to the ideas and then see what the AI suggests as improvements for you know nugget consolidation crystallization even the cleaving of I mean if if Gen AI understood how to nuggetize well and we could then stick it on a corpus of things and improve them from a nuggetized perspective that's a that's a really cool benefit because one of our problems here is how do we separate one idea from the next how do we link them when they're related how do we allow them to be neighbors when they're different right I think all those things are super interesting questions that AI could be very helpful with so this concept of book Jerry I understand why it's it's a foundational piece but this might be a better way to think of this whole project as curators of content okay knowledge communities yeah what was a Doug Engelbart had a term knowledge something communities nicks that that's kind of what we're trying to design here very much yeah and and that's a great thing to consider go ahead class yeah to give you an example how how I intact with the AI at Jean sent me a note Jean Bellinger sent me a note with a book written by Bill Gates and I ran it through my neo book reviewer and you know it just I mean messed messed with it a little bit and sent it back to him here's what AI thinks about this and he goes well what do you think so I went back and and I asked I asked a given instructions elaborate on the criticism of the book and it came up with a whole list of critical components and then you know Jean is the the ultimate questionnaire you know he has the socratic way of asking questions that just pulls you along and so so then the next question well well what's missing in this critique since AI is basically rehashing what everybody already knows or what's out there you know so what would the AI say about missing in there well the AI doesn't say a darn thing about what's missing in there but I asked it a question and as to say is it a fair assumption that Bill Gates is basically divorced from the reality of nature is a living thing you know that that nature is alive and that he looks at nature from a mechanical perspective and the AI then came back and concurred now that indeed you know he seems to interpret nature as something that can be manipulated and dealt with so so you're moving so when you see these questions it's not that AI will give you an automatic answer you have to you have to guide it with your hypothesis to to move into the next stage and then it will either agree or disagree with what you're saying but that's how you how you sort of test your way along the topics but then otherwise I would say nuggets they come out automatically I wouldn't worry about what is a nugget and what is not as you're writing you know that what what what turns into a nugget will come out later when you reread your own work and you say oh that's really a freestanding topic here or it could be and maybe I need to elaborate it a little bit but the discussion of nuggets I think is secondary to writing the book no and then understanding how it breaks down into subtopics that could that could be allocated to different conversations I think I mostly agree with your class and I certainly don't want to distract somebody who just wants to sit down and write a book but I find myself thinking nuggetly I'm writing wickily I find myself changing how I write to make better nuggets along the way and I would love those nuggets to sort of test their logic and their worth in the marketplace of ideas as people collaborate with the emerging manuscript before it ever becomes a book I would really like that so so that means that the nuggets might actually change a bit a bunch before my manuscript is done for example and that's a that's a longer conversation I think and then an interesting one to have Pete thanks real quick on nuggets and then thinking through Jose's question about could an AI do and then if folks are interested I can give like a three or four minute report I was late because Jordan and I were having fun working on publishing a book and I can do a quick report on that if it doesn't disrupt the flow of conversation so the I I like you're thinking about nuggets class and I think maybe a zoom out maybe is that nugget nuggetizing and writing shouldn't conflict with each other I think some people I think actually when I write I write nuggets first and then I fill in the nuggets and I've got a kind of a workflow that I think of for especially wikis but it works for books too it's a chunking naming linking so chunking is taking a bunch of undifferentiated stuff I know about a topic and saying well I know about this part of it this part of this part of this part and then if you give those a nice name the you know the the creation of the tabletop sawing wood finishing the tabletop you know different materials you could use those are kind of undifferentated and undifferentiated chunks then if you give them a nice name you can refer to them especially when you've got a huge number of chunks like that you know 100 chunks or 200 chunks and then you go okay well if I'm putting this together and I'm telling the story about somebody I should go through these chunks first and those chunks later and I'll move this and and then they start getting a life of their own and they get bigger and stuff like that when you're working in a wiki those names are also the names of a page so wikis work really well with chunks and reordering chunks and sorting them and stuff like that so I think it's kind of both and you know you you sometimes you work from the bottom up and sometimes you work from the top down and whatever makes sense um uh Jose your thought about AI is is really smart and I think it's really good um I think the way I like to say how um the way I like to say it is how would a human do this with the help of an AI so if in my mind when I say AI I kind of immediately expand that to a power tool for language you know chat chat AI so how would I you know how would a human use a power tool for language to um make this into chunks um look at this I'm going to use chunk and now get a little bit interchangeably look at this chunk and this chunk and reword these two to fit these other six so that kind of stuff is something that chopper is really good at and the thing to be mindful about is that you can't say here AI fix this but kind of like Klaus said you can say AI can you help me make this make more sense with that or what's missing from this or those kinds of things so the the agency there is not the AI the agency is resident within the human and the human is using a power tool to go okay I need this bunch of text to get bigger smaller turn into different pieces whatever so let me give a quick recap of Jordan and Pete publishing a book this was our second meeting today we kind of like looked around and we decided well let's do pole planning is what Jordan calls it let's do back casting from where we want to be to see what we need to do Jordan is interested in publishing via Lulu which I think is an Ingram thing no it's independent well at least it was independent I guess well they end up it was done by the founder of Red Hat I feel like Bob Young will enterprise it it it leans on top of Ingram's distribution maybe and I apologize you're right it's it's an independent thing so anyway if you publish so you know one of the first questions in publishing is a Lulu or KDP or KDP or Lulu you know everybody does KDP KDP Kindle whatever publishing means that Amazon will publish it make it really easy for you and then you can't sell it anywhere else at least without reproducing the book so Lulu is the other way around you produce it once in Lulu and then it goes to Ingram for distribution to a bunch of different places including Amazon and iBooks and your own website if you want and lulu.com yeah I didn't realize this but they have a bookstore that you can go to and buy stuff so Jordan wants to use Lulu so he said okay well so starting from zero like we know nothing about Lulu we made a Lionsburg account on Lulu and then we stepped through the process of making a book and we got we got all the way through it in you know an hour or so from zero content literally to if you click this button the book is going to be in in stores we didn't click that button because we had made kind of a junk book but the junk book was actually written with chat upt three and a half because it's faster it actually came out to be a pretty good book I would actually read it it was about critical path the the Bucksminster Fuller book and max and his his discovery of the book and learning about it and things like that we just wrote up some sample content using chat upt so the it actually went all really smoothly the main learnings that we have is that Lulu is going to want you kind of end up wanting to use either Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign Microsoft Word for straightforward books that aren't too too complicated and InDesign for lots of page formatting like a coffee table book or you know something like that I wanted to try using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word and we think we might have identified a problem there we we took a Microsoft Word template from Lulu for the right page size that we wanted then we copied our content and you know we loaded that in Google Docs we copied the content into that Google Doc fixed it up a tiny bit and then said save to save to PDF Lulu takes a PDF so when we loaded the PDF and it did the preview some of the lines ran over the the margin area it was still it still fit in the page I think it would print but it was a little bit ugly so our next step is to buy official Microsoft Word but I was pleasantly surprised that the whole process was pretty straightforward and easy to do they have an option we thought we would need an is-been going in ISPN a standard book number for publishing they will give you a free is-been which comes out under the Lulu imprint which is okay for onesie twosies george would prefer to have all his books under the lionsburg imprint so he'll have his own his bins but went pretty well that's awesome so we're close yeah that many questions comments thoughts repeat on that just as as Pete was talking about it I started imagining books under this might be much smaller and much more consumable our social media habits might dictate that what we do is not write large books with lots of foundational blocks but smaller books with small fewer number of foundational blocks that have that are consumable easy and allow us to interact with with the nuggets in a way that are not as complex as our books are today and and it might actually appeal to younger folks as what a book could be in a different way so it's just just something that occurred to me maybe I'm wrong but it seems like it it reflects what where we're going socially so that go ahead sir the trend has been over the past 10 years or so to go with um smaller books with more white space and more graphics because the truth is that I don't know the exact number but something like 90 percent of books purchased a rat with a never read okay yeah wait that's after the number that's after the terrible stats about how many books actually ever get sold damn yeah like I think it's like 78 percent of ebooks never actually get read makes good sense I guess it's it's a very similar with you know with with printed books with physical books people buy them and don't read them yeah so we're not we're not really sorry I was just gonna say we're not really passing along information if that's what we're have is what's happening right so the idea of of of delivering content in in a more consumable format is very congruent with some of the trends in the in the in the book publishing industry Pete then I wanted to add a little comment then class and I will need to leave at the top of the hour sharp me too I like your your intuition your provocation there Jose but I would I would offer it offer a different one not not not disagree a different one would be that if you're actually making a book you can actually make them longer and more rich nowadays because you know that the content in it is going out a bunch of different ways so a new book the the print version of a new book might be a classical book it might be a two 300 pager with lots of rich detail and all kinds of stuff and that same content goes out in social media and sub snack posts and you know PDFs of each chapter and stuff like that so the the social media social media attraction you've got there or more mode modality you actually do in social media and not in print and that frees up the print one to be like a nice print book and then the the reason we make books nowadays is not so much to I mean because of what we just talked about you know people don't read books books are made to make a statement or to talk to the future or you know to be a marketing piece or something like that so you know those those kinds of things don't you don't need a small book for that and actually a big book is this kind of better so I both ways work um thanks Pete to follow along that part of the notion on neo books is that neo books are that a book is just a playlist of nuggets and so it could be a longer short kind of doesn't matter you could in fact publish the same neo book at three different levels of depth where one of them follows all the tendrils out and includes a bunch of other resources from other people and it might be a thousand page book but it's a it's a it's a conclusive narrative linearized narrative because that's what books do that has a lot of materials in it and then there could be a you know 10 000 word version of the same exact book that only publishes the top most level nuggets and then if you went to the online artifact you could find your way through the whole forest of linked linked topics etc second thing I wanted to say is that april and i on friday watched the movie origin which is the dramatization of isabel wilkerson's book cast and it you read you start reading cast you're like there ain't no way this could be a book and they did a very avid de verne did the script and was the director did a brilliant job of making a movie out of it by dramatizing isabel's life and weaving it into instances of cast problems worldwide and and and isabel proves her thesis for me really really well and her thesis partly is hey folks the problem isn't racism it's actually cast which is some artificial structure by which we make some people inferior to other people and then institutionalize it everywhere and she she plays that out really well she has the eight pillars of cast which i put in my brain this morning because that's one of the nice sort of systemic things she she talks about about how cast gets done and she had only ever published one book before that she was a one book author who was out on the speaking circuit which is a part of the beginning of the book she's she's out giving speeches on her one book and the movie is the story of her coming up with this other book and i'm like wow that's one person's career with two books and and and some people die having written one great book and that's the thing they did steward has written a bunch of books and co-authored as well but the one great book was a Pulitzer Prize-winning book um the first the first one after i saw the movie origin i had never read it it's the story of the the um the black migration from south to north in the us uh i pulled out the book because i decided that i i actually wanted to read it so it's it's it's it's back in the queue so you've you've upped the frequent or the chances that that book is being read yeah yes exactly but so just to talk just to say a little bit about size of books frequency of anybody touching books whatever i'm really interested in in us upping the the frequency of people interacting about all the wisdom that's buried in books these days sorry about that class go ahead yeah so as i'm following the conversation i have i have a few questions is the idea of having an ogm url website that contains new books something that makes sense i mean is there a place where we can combine everybody give them a space and create a new book page that's one question then the other thing is speed now as you are going with your book here and you publish via lulu does that fit into the scheme of consolidating new books under an umbrella uh do all the other new books then also go into lulu format or is there something how do we go about this from a technical basic perspective i mean wait how do we get from here you know talking about you know a lot of technical things to let's actually do something and and not make a project out of it and just and then and then you know don't overthink it if you get it right 50 60 percent that's fantastic right and we can fiddle with it and advance it further but we have been going for quite a while now um it would be awesome to actually see a product um that becomes sort of tangible and that we can play with um two things quickly pete was just part of a project that he talked about last week i think where they wrote a book in a month roughly i don't know two months but a bunch of people compiled volumes and got a book out that's available on kinville you can go buy it right now sorry not i'm kinville it's available as a paper bound which i don't understand at all anyway um i tried i signed up for kdp kinville direct publishing a while ago but it turns out that if you do that kdp only wants you to publish a kinville book the reason to go to lulu is that it gives you avenue into a variety of different publishing environments and and pete is busy doing the footwork for researching the technical aspects that you just pointed to classes being thorny it's like yep and if we solve a couple of these well enough then the first couple books can go maybe through lulu and then after that we discover something else or create something i don't know but but but pete is actually doing the the footwork to figure out which of these channels is makes the most sense for us rather than the channel conversation sorry jr you have to go yeah is new books a publishing press or is it a process right and my answer i think is actually it's both but be interesting here awesome i i'm going to bounce and pass the con to who's going to stay the longest on this call i'm out of here as well i'm ready to go but i wanted to say quickly before you guys leave what i'm hearing is is that we're coming to a publishing process whatever that means that we're getting we're getting closer so pete wants you thank you for coming on i also wanted to show you that's the book person's first this is the first one okay the war it's it's 650 pages that's all looks like more looks like more thanks guys great call thank you